seangabb
Published 13 Mar 2021In 120 BC, Rome was a republic with touches of democracy. A century later, it was a divine right military dictatorship. Between January and March 2021, Sean Gabb explored this transformation with his students. Here is one of his lectures. All student contributions have been removed.
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April 11, 2022
Republic to Empire: The Ides of March to Actium
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Ours is a fundamentally unserious culture, two examples
Chris Bray provides some examples of just how decayed western culture has become in our headlong flight toward total unseriousness:
In Europe this month to lead the diplomatic response to a war, the Vice-President of the United States responded to a question about refugees by giggling and cackling and babbling in typical form:
And then the “fact-checkers” at Reuters explained that she actually didn’t giggle and cackle and babble, because, okay, she did cackle and giggle and babble, but she didn’t cackle and giggle and babble specifically about the refugees, so it doesn’t count: “It is clear from viewing the longer video in context that Harris and Duda laughed at the awkwardness of not knowing who should speak first. There is no evidence that Harris was laughing at the refugees or the crisis in Ukraine.” The question was about refugees, and she laughed — she laughed a lot — right after the question, but Reuters apparently called no tagbacks before the play, so no points accrue.
So we have an awkward and ineffective playactor who occupies the position of a political leader, but lacks the stature or ability to go along with it, and we have journalists who labor to protect people in powerful political positions from the possibility that people will notice who they really are and what they really do. We have political leaders who aren’t political leaders, and journalists who aren’t journalists: the form without the substance.
Meanwhile, a recent debate on the topic of free speech at Yale Law School — the nation’s top-ranked law school, which produces presidents and Supreme Court justices — began with law students screaming abuse (“I’ll fight you, bitch”) at one of the panelists, before walking out as a group and continuing to shout and pound on the walls of the adjacent hallway.
Now: The students were angry at the panelist, the bitch they wanted to fight, because she’s an anti-trans social conservative, and couldn’t you just die? But the thing that law students are learning to do is be lawyers — advocates for a position in a formalized exchange of competing views, in controversies that play out in open court. They’re training at the profession of making an argument. The point of sitting through an argument made by a person whose views you despise is that you can learn about something you want to fight against; you can see what the enemy says, and how she says it, and so do a part of the work of preparing yourself to advance a different position. So we have law students, people training for a debate-and-exchange-centered profession, who don’t want to hear things they don’t agree with. It’s like a minor league baseball player saying he refuses to touch a baseball, because baseballs offend him, but anyway, when are you assholes sending me up to the major leagues? We have people who want to occupy the profession of the law without preparing for the substance of professional engagement with competing positions: the form without the substance.
(Doing what journalists do, now, the fact-checkers explain that none of this puts points on the anti-free-speech scoreboard: “The students made their point at the very start of the event and walked out before the conversation began.” It is precisely the point that 1.) law students 2.) walked out before the conversation began. In ten years, oral argument before the Supreme Court will be that Woke lawyers stand up and scream I’M NOT GONNA LISTEN TO THIS SHIT, YOU ASSHOLES at the justices, then storm out and descend into a long round of day-drinking while waiting for the court to rule in their favor, because oh my god they CAN’T EVEN.)
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Book Review: Sturmgewehr! From Firepower to Striking Power (New Expanded Edition)
Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Sep 2017Get your copy from Collector Grade Publications: http://www.collectorgrade.com/bookshe…
Collector Grade is known for being a premiere publisher of technical firearms reference books, and I would be willing to argue that Sturmgewehr! by Hans-Dieter Handrich is the best book they have yet printed. The book was originally printed in 2004, and by the time I started looking for a copy myself, it was out of print and the price had jumped to at least $250, when I could even find a copy. I could never quite bring myself to pay that much, and so I was very excited when I learned that an expanded second edition was in the works. Well, that second edition is available now, and it’s even better than I had anticipated.
What makes Sturmgewehr! such an excellent book in my opinion is how it tackles the story of the MP43/MP44/StG44 from several different angles in depth. It has the mechanical development of the gun from prewar experiments to the open-bolt MKb-42 trials guns to the production versions. But it also puts those guns in historical context, how they related to the other weapons being used by both Germany and other nations. It discusses how the design criteria of the Sturmgewehr were arrived at, in terms of logistics and manufacturing methodologies. It explains in detail the political disagreements and convoluted process of weapon design and adoption in Germany, including the three direct rejections of the concept by Hitler.
In short, it gives you the fully-rounded story of how the German military conceived and implemented a whole new class of small arms. In this way, it is really much more than just a book about a single gun’s history — what you learn reading Handrich’s work will give you insight into virtually all arms design programs of the 20th century, from the Chauchat to the 7.62mm NATO rifle trials to the SA80.
If you already have a copy of the original work, you will probably want this one as well, to get the additional 120 pages of information that have been added. And it should go without saying that if you don’t have the original, you should absolutely get a copy of this new edition before it also falls out of print!
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QotD: Programmers as craftsmen
The people most likely to grasp that wealth can be created are the ones who are good at making things, the craftsmen. Their hand-made objects become store-bought ones. But with the rise of industrialization there are fewer and fewer craftsmen. One of the biggest remaining groups is computer programmers.
A programmer can sit down in front of a computer and create wealth. A good piece of software is, in itself, a valuable thing. There is no manufacturing to confuse the issue. Those characters you type are a complete, finished product. If someone sat down and wrote a web browser that didn’t suck (a fine idea, by the way), the world would be that much richer.*
Everyone in a company works together to create wealth, in the sense of making more things people want. Many of the employees (e.g. the people in the mailroom or the personnel department) work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. Not the programmers. They literally think the product, one line at a time. And so it’s clearer to programmers that wealth is something that’s made, rather than being distributed, like slices of a pie, by some imaginary Daddy.
It’s also obvious to programmers that there are huge variations in the rate at which wealth is created. At Viaweb we had one programmer who was a sort of monster of productivity. I remember watching what he did one long day and estimating that he had added several hundred thousand dollars to the market value of the company. A great programmer, on a roll, could create a million dollars worth of wealth in a couple weeks. A mediocre programmer over the same period will generate zero or even negative wealth (e.g. by introducing bugs).
This is why so many of the best programmers are libertarians. In our world, you sink or swim, and there are no excuses. When those far removed from the creation of wealth — undergraduates, reporters, politicians — hear that the richest 5% of the people have half the total wealth, they tend to think injustice! An experienced programmer would be more likely to think is that all? The top 5% of programmers probably write 99% of the good software.
Wealth can be created without being sold. Scientists, till recently at least, effectively donated the wealth they created. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we’re less likely to die from infections. Wealth is whatever people want, and not dying is certainly something we want. Hackers often donate their work by writing open source software that anyone can use for free. I am much the richer for the operating system FreeBSD, which I’m running on the computer I’m using now, and so is Yahoo, which runs it on all their servers.
* This essay was written before Firefox.
Paul Graham, “How to Make Wealth”, Paul Graham, 2004-04.
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